The Hindu Business Line : All about widsets

If you use ‘reminders’ on your mobile phone, you may find ‘Widsets’ useful. This Java-based application developed by Nokia facilitates customised data creation, reception and sharing on the mobile phone.

E-mail, news, search and games are some popular content categories available at present. Such content (called a widget) can be created on the Internet and made available for mobile phone downloads at www.widsets.com/dashboard.

Once downloaded, the user starts receiving updates on his device every time the widget is modified (either on the Web site or through a mobile phone).

For instance, if your friend has shared his photo album with you using Flickr.com’s widget, you will receive an update every time he modifies his album. What is more, if you also share an e-mail widget with him (like gmail.com), you get a pop-up alert every time he sends you a mail.

One can get widget updates and alerts even without accessing those widgets on one’s mobile phone.

Users are charged depending on the content they download, for instance picture-based content would be costlier than text based content. With about 1 million users worldwide for ‘Nokia Widsets’, including a few lakh in India, the company is in talks with mobile operators in Europe to market the application.

Crossing language barriers

Translate at will.

Language scripts arouse curiosity in most people. The more foreign the script, the more curious one gets to know what the billboard writing or lines on an ethnic restaurant’s menu card mean. How about using your mobile phone to de-mystify the script?

At Nokia Connections 2007, your correspondent was looking through a Chinese menu card like a native, thanks to Nokia’s new translation software application developed at its Beijing centre. One needs a Nokia N95 device to run the application called ‘Shoot to translate’. The device’s camera feature can be used to focus on the lines that need translation and when clicked (as in shooting a picture), one has the English translation of the word.

Scripts are currently translated phrase-to-phrase. But the company has commenced work on an application that will do sentence-level translation. This means one will be able to read news, books and other extensive written material in foreign scripts without losing the text’s meaning.

Chinese, Japanese and English content is currently supported by the application and Nokia plans to cover other languages too. Until that happens, it may be interesting to explore your neighbourhood Chinese/ Japanese restaurant, armed with an N95.

archana@thehindu.co.in